POLES APART
Poles Apart
Polly Courtney
UK & Commonwealth rights: Troubador
Polish Rights: Swiat Ksiazki
All other rights available
Armed with a degree from the prestigious Kozminski Academy of Management in Warsaw, Marta Dabrowska is excited about beginning a career in marketing. Poland's having recently joined the EU means that she has the opportunity to go to London to do this, which will offer her many more openings in her chosen field than Warsaw. Her mother has arranged for her to stay with Tash, the daughter of a contact of hers from some time ago in a part of London called Kensington.
When Marta arrives with her one suitcase, she is thrown into a life which is completely outside her experience, and not quite what she was expecting. She finds it very difficult to relate to spoilt Tash, whose parents have bought her a house in the most expensive part of town and who seems to have no concept of money at all, spending her days painting her nails and socialising with her equally incomprehensible friends. On top of this, Marta's impressive CV seems to make little impact on potential employers. Put simply, life in London is not at all what she had hoped it would be.
When Tash's boyfriend Jack makes a pass at Marta, Tash throws her out. She is taken in by the more down to earth Holly, gets a job which seems to have potential and meets a lovely Polish man. However, when said Polish man turns out to be not as lovely as she had thought and she is simultaneously pursued by flashy banker Jack who Tash has now apparently dumped and Marta now sees another side of him, her life begins to take a different turn altogether.
Poles Apart is a touching, hilarious comedy of errors with a very contemporary take on the rags to riches story.
Polly Courtney was brought up in London after a brief period in the United States. At sixteen she transferred to an all-boys grammar school, a move which was to stand her in good stead for the years to come. She spent twelve months testing engines and gearboxes at an automotive consultancy in Sussex, then went on to obtain a double first in Engineering from Cambridge. Along with many of her “high flying” peers, she was lured to the City by the promise of a lucrative, fast-paced career in the exciting world of high finance. What she discovered was something very different.
As soon as she set foot in the Square Mile, Polly realised that there was something to shout about. Being someone who doesn't hold back, she decided to write about how it really is for young graduates in the City, hence her first novel, Golden Handcuffs. She started writing in her first (and only) year at Merrill Lynch and quickly realised that words rather than numbers were where her real talent lay. Having quit banking, she is now working in strategy consulting as well as writing. She also devotes considerable time to her semi-professional all-girl string quartet, No Strings Attached, and to playing with a women's football team.
www.pollycourtney.com
